Smartphone giants like Samsung are going to talk up ‘AI phones’ this year — here’s what that means
Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S24 smartphones during a media preview event in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. Samsung, the world’s most prolific smartphone maker, is leaning into artificial intelligence as the key to unlocking greater sales this year. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence phones: these are the buzzwords you’ll likely hear this year, as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a difficult stretch of time.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on huge amounts of data that are able to produce text, images and prompts from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every industry and entered the popular imagination.
Smartphone makers see a chance to cash in and are going to be touting the tech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile industry trade show in the world, which kicks off on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.
“Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, told CNBC.
What is an AI phone?
The gear is harder to define, and it depends on which manufacturer you ask.
Analysts who spoke to CNBC broadly agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications, and that those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.
Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the processing power required for AI applications.
But AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed features such as background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing.
What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative AI. Large language models are huge AI models trained on vast amounts of data that underpin applications like the widely popular chatbots. These models unlock new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from a user prompt.
“It is not just about having a chatbot, we have had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, it is generative now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. If it is about text to image creation, that was something that wasn’t done before,” Ma said.
The other big part of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partly processed in the cloud, then downloaded onto the phone. But advanced chips and the ability for large language models to effectively become smaller are likely to drive more AI applications to be run solely in the device, rather than in a data center.
“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability of the AI models too run natively on the devices themselves and that is where it potentially starts to become a bit more of a gamechanger,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC.
Smartphone makers say on-device AI improves the security of gear, unlocks new applications and also makes them faster, since the processing is done on the handset.
This could unlock new applications that developers could create, both Ma and Wood said.
Eventually, Wood said, smartphone makers want to achieve “anticipatory computing” — the idea that AI “is smart enough to learn your behavior as a user and make the device so much more intuitive and predicting what you want to do next without you having to do much.”
But are AI phones a reality right now?
Sort of. AI has been used in devices for some time, but the new era of on-device AI with large language models is still in its early stages.
Device makers at MWC are going to show off lots of AI-powered features — and we are already seeing some of it. In January, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone range, touting its AI capabilities. One feature that drew attention was the ability to circle an image or text you’re looking at on any app, then immediately search that on Google.
MWC will likely include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.
But the reality is that a lot of these perks are not actually on-device and still rely on processing in the cloud, according to IDC’s Ma. He added that, even with AI capabilities on devices, it will take a “number of years” before third-party developers figure out a “killer use case or that compelling use case that consumer can’t do without.”
Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk a lot about AI, rather than about the experiences that the technology can deliver for users.
“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is, they need the use cases to go round it,” Wood said. The risk is that there is “AI fatigue.”
Ultimately, the lofty AI experiences smartphone makers are dreaming of could be a long way out.
“We are building an unbelievable foundational platform for AI on device. 2024 will be the year we look back on and say that’s where it all started to happen but it could be a long time before we start of these benefit of that in terms of game changing experiences,” Wood said.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has been on a tour of Europe this week, bringing excitement and intrigue to everywhere he visited.
His message was clear — Nvidia is the company that can help Europe build its artificial intelligence infrastructure so the region can take control of its own destiny with the transformative technology.
I’ve been in London and Paris this week following Huang around as he met with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, journalists, fans, analysts and gave a keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in the capital of France.
Here’s the what I saw and the key things I learned.
The draw of Huang is huge
Huang is truly the current rockstar of the tech world.
At London Tech Week, the lines were long and the auditorium packed to hear him speak.
The GTC event in Paris was full too. It was like going to a music concert or sporting event. There were GTC Paris T-shirts on the back of every chair and even a merchandise store.
Nvidia GTC in Paris on 11 June 2025
Arjun Kharpal
The aura of Huang really struck me when, after a question-and-answer session with him and a room full of attendees, most people lined up to take pictures or selfies with him.
Macron and Starmer both wanted to be seen on stage with him.
Nvidia positions itself as Europe’s AI hope
Nvidia’s key product is its graphics processing units (GPU) that are used to train and execute AI applications.
But Huang has positioned Nvidia as more than a chip company. During the week, he described Nvidia as an infrastructure firm. He also said AI should be seen as infrastructure like electricity.
His pitch to all countries was that Nvidia could be the company that will help countries build out that infrastructure.
“We believe that in order to compete, in order to build a meaningful ecosystem, Europe needs to come together and build capacity that is joint,” Huang said during a speech at the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
One of the most significant partnerships announced this week is between French startup Mistral and Nvidia to build a so-called AI cloud using the latter’s GPUs.
Huang spoke a lot during the week about “sovereign AI” — the concept of building data centers within a country’s borders that services its population rather than relying on servers located overseas. Among European policymakers and companies, this has been an important topic.
Huang also heaped praise on the U.K., France and Europe more broadly when it came to their potential in the AI industry.
China still behind but catching up
On Thursday, Huang decided to do a tour of Nvidia’s booth and I managed to catch him to get a few words on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
A key topic of that discussion was China. Nvidia has not been able to sell its most advanced chips to China because of U.S. export controls and even less sophisticated semiconductors are being blocked. In its last quarterly results, Nvidia took a $4.5 billion hit on unsold inventory.
I asked Huang about how China was progressing with AI chips, in particular referencing Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that is trying to make semiconductor products to rival Nvidia.
Huang said Huawei is a generation behind Nvidia. But because there is lots of energy in China, Huawei can just use more chips to get results.
“If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered,” Huang said.
In addition, Huang is concerned about the strategic importance of U.S. companies not having access to China.
“It’s even more important that the American technology stack is what AI developers around the world build on,” Huang said.
Just reading between the lines somewhat — Huang sees a world where Chinese AI tech advances. Some countries may decide to build their AI infrastructure with Chinese companies rather than American. That in turn could give Chinese companies a chance to be in the AI race.
Quantum, robotics and driverless is the future
Huang often uses public appearances to talk about the future.
I asked him about some of those areas he’s bullish on like robotics and driverless cars, technology that Nvidia’s products can power.
Huang told me this will be the “decade of” autonomous vehicles and robotics.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang delivers a speech on stage talking about robotics.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
During his keynote at GTC Paris on Wednesday, he also address quantum computing, saying the technology is reaching “an inflection point.”
Quantum computers are widely believed to be able to solve complex problems that classic computers can’t. This could include things like discovering new drugs or materials.
In an aerial view, a Tesla showroom at 12845 N. US 183 Highway Service Road is seen after police were called for a suspicious device in Austin, Texas, on March 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
With Elon Musk looking to June 22 as his tentative start date for Tesla’s pilot robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, protesters are voicing their opposition.
Public safety advocates and political protesters, upset with Musk’s work with the Trump administration, joined together in downtown Austin on Thursday to express their concerns about the robotaxi launch. Members of the Dawn Project, Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin say that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have safety problems.
Tesla sells its cars with a standard Autopilot package, or a premium Full Self-Driving option (also known as FSD or FSD supervised), in the U.S. Automobiles with these systems, which include features like automatic lane keeping, steering and parking, have been involved in dozens of collisions, some fatal, according to data tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Tesla’s robotaxis, which Musk showed off in a video clip on X earlier this week, are new versions of the company’s popular Model Y vehicles, equipped with a future release of Tesla’s FSD software. That “unsupervised” FSD, or robotaxi technology, is not yet available to the public.
Tesla critics with The Dawn Project, which calls itself a tech-safety and security education business, brought a version of Model Y with relatively recent FSD software (version 2025.14.9) to show residents of Austin how it works.
In their demonstration on Thursday, they showed how a Tesla with FSD engaged zoomed past a school bus with a stop sign held out and ran over a child-sized mannequin that they put in front of the vehicle.
Dawn Project CEO Dan O’Dowd also runs Green Hills Software, which sells technology to Tesla competitors, including Ford and Toyota.
Stephanie Gomez, who attended the demonstration, told CNBC that she didn’t like the role Musk had been playing in the government. Additionally, she said she has no confidence in Tesla’s safety standards and said there’s been a lack of transparency from Tesla regarding how its robotaxis will work.
Another protester, Silvia Revelis, said she also opposed Musk’s political activity, but that safety is the biggest concern.
“Citizens have not been able to get safety testing results,” she said. “Musk believes he’s above the law.”
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
— Todd Wiseman contributed to this report.
WATCH: Tesla’s next leg up is $400
23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 2025.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and former CEO of 23andMe, has regained control over the embattled genetic testing company after her new nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, outbid Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company announced Friday.
TTAM will acquire substantially all of 23andMe’s assets for $305 million, including its Personal Genome Service and Research Services business lines as well as telehealth subsidiary Lemonaid Health. It’s a big win for Wojcicki, who stepped down from her role as CEO when 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March.
Last month, Regeneron announced it would purchase most of 23andMe’s assets for $256 million after it came out on top during a bankruptcy auction. But Wojcicki submitted a separate $305 million bid through TTAM and pushed to reopen the auction. TTAM is an acronym for the first letters of 23andMe, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“I am thrilled that TTAM Research Institute will be able to continue the mission of 23andMe to help people access, understand and benefit from the human genome,” Wojcicki said in a statement.
23andMe gained popularity because of its at-home DNA testing kits that gave customers insight into their family histories and genetic profiles. The five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. At its peak, 23andMe was valued at around $6 billion.
The company struggled to generate recurring revenue and stand up viable research and therapeutics businesses after going public, and it has been plagued by privacy concerns since hackers accessed the information of nearly seven million customers in 2023.
TTAM’s acquisition is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
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